"At issue is whether certain government agencies are exempt from the state's open carry law, passed in 2015, which allows Texans with a license to openly tote their handguns in a hip or shoulder holster."

Recall the previously the judge ruled that even if there is a courtroom in the City Hall, licensed carry can NOT be prohibited if the court is not in session. I would not have gotten that from the parts of the law I have read, but it cuts against the impression that she is trying to be anti-carry. If followed state-wide, this ruling seems to actually opens up courthouses that consist solely of court rooms and court offices when court is not in session.

Her ruling that Austin can be fined only on the days when there's evidence that a licensed carrier attempted to enter and was illegally denied entrance is also not something I would have gotten from the law, but it parallels her ruling that entry can be prohibited only when court is in session. It makes me wonder if there is another legal principle at play here.

It appears if you want to really zing your local government for banning carry in a multi-use building, make sure you organize a posse to attempt entry at least once each day, and document the dickens out of it for use in court later.

Along the way it has been mentioned in court documents that the citizen who originally filed a complaint about licensed carry being banned was Michael Cargill. Since I seldom pay attention to Austin except when the Legislature is in session or something really really goofy happens, I was unaware the Mr. Cargill has been thorn in the side of Austin city government for quite some time now. I'm sure the city government would oppose licensed carry and guns in general without Mr. Cargill's involvement, but I'll bet his involvement put some extra hot sauce on the issue for them.

Paxton’s office is asking state District Judge Lora Livingston to require the city to comply with the law and to fine Austin $1,500 a day for the first 500 days it kept firearm holders out of the building since the lawsuit was filed.

After listening to final arguments Tuesday, Livingston said she would rule later.

This is interesting:

The judge hinted at one point that Paxton’s office had no choice but to file the lawsuit because the city told licensed firearm holders they could not come into City Hall but did not reveal that doing so would not trigger criminal charges.

It appears the judge is saying that if the armed LTC holder had entered despite being told he couldn't, he would not have broken the law.

For reasons unknown to me, the hearing date for Paxton v City of Austin has slid back to January 07, 2019 at 09:00 AM.

I have since learned the trial was rescheduled from Sep 2017 to yesterday because one of the OAG's lawyers had a death in the family just before the trial was to start. Rescheduling was more or less at the mercy of the City of Austin's stated availability for trial (for which I doubt they were in any hurry), so it was rescheduled to start yesterday at 0900.

I just checked with someone in the OAG's office, and found the trial is scheduled for two days, so it should wrap up today. I may learn more later in the week, and there may be media coverage of it. No time frame for the judge's decision, of course. Keep standing by.

Does that mean that there can be no decision about whether or not the judge was wrong to say that the city could ban LTC’s from carrying in the non-court areas even when the courts are in session?

A trial court's decision can be appealed to an appellate court. I am sure that at least one party to the case will do so, and maybe both parties will appeal different parts of the decision. The immediate result of that appeal with be that nothing will change at any courthouse -- those courthouse's that want to ban licensed carry from an entire building will continue to do so. The potential fines will be accumulating...but only against those political entities that some citizen has lodged a complaint against with the AG.

If only the city kept accumulating a fine for each day they were in violation while this process continued. If that were the case and the fine was due when the decision made and they lost they wouldn’t want to wait so long I bet.

IIRC the fine starts accumulating 15 days after the OAG issues (or the City receives) the OAG's violation letter (and the City has not cured the issue). I believe the OAG's letter was issued in July of 2016, but I don't have access to it right now.

In this case the judge has ruled that the City is not in violation by forbidding licensed carry in the non-court part of the building when court is in session, but it can be in violation when court is NOT in session. I believe the OAG still has to show that the city was improperly preventing licensed carry when the court was not in session, and if the OAG makes that case, a fine should follow. It will be interesting to see how that is calculated.

I was able to contact someone in the OAG, and it turns out that the hearing that was supposed to happen in September did not occur because one of the attorneys for the OAG had a death in the family and could not attend the hearing, so it was postponed. That unfortunately put the schedule at the mercy of the attorneys for the city -- altho I think the OAG was ready to proceed later in September, the city said they were not available until closer to the end of the year. So that became a 03 Dec hearing date.

Paxton v City of Austin has another hearing scheduled for 03 Dec 2018 at 0900. I am calling the OAG's office tomorrow to see if I can find out what happened at the hearing on 17 Sep, and what issues remain to be settled in December.

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One can argue it's poorly written since a judge can make the argument above but then there's no way to craft any legislation today that activist judges will not find someway around in their rulings.

Using the judge's interpretation of legislative intent seems far more "activist" and dangerous than simply using the text as they legislature wrote it.

In other news: The website of the Texas Attorney General has undergone a make over, and … they screwed it up. Most of the 30.06 stuff has disappeared, the only remaining artifact is a web page where you can register a complaint about government entities. And I had to use the search function to find that. I was surprised to see on that page a "30.06 Complaint Hot Line" followed by a phone number. That's new! So I called it. It was answered with a cautious "hello?" Turns out it was an office cell phone recently issued to a guy who works in the money-laundering office of the OAG. He said he had been getting some other odd calls lately too.

So I started calling around various contact numbers to find somebody to complain to about the missing stuff. I kind of bounced around between the receptionist and some ladies in various "complaint" offices (e.g. Child Support complaints, Consumer Complaints) because the IT specialists were not answering their phones, but eventually found a lady (I think in the Consumer Complaints office) who made notes about what was missing and promised to hunt down the IT specialists. She said they were not thrilled with the new look, there were a lot of complaints coming in about the rest of the website as well.

"Legislative intent" does not trump "what the Legislature actually wrote", and I believe that is a rather solid judicial principle well known to both the judiciary and the Legislature. "Legislative intent" is also often in the eye of the beholder, which is why it makes a lesser method of interpreting the law.

Wildrose, if you or anyone can point to a source that documents the legislative intent of the 46.03 weapons-prohibited-in-court section, as well as the "building or portion of a building I would love to read it. This exact point has been argued many times on this forum, and I think this is an easy one to confuse "my intent" with the legislature's intent. I wish it were otherwise, but the judge laid down a pretty good analysis of how 46.03 and 46.035 play together.

As well, her ruling on the temporal nature of this restriction speaks (loudly) against her simply trying to restrict the rights of license holders. Her opinion doesn't really cite where that came from, I assume it is something that the OAG's briefs brought forward, but had she been dead-set against carry in the courthouse she could have easily dispensed with the temporal issue.

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As the law is written I don't see how she can justify allowing the entire building to be posted even when court is in session.
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I guess that's why we have judges to make a decision, because as I read the law, I thought the AG was being, let's say "very aggressive" in stating that only the courtrooms and court offices were off limits to carry.

The judge notes in her previous ruling that 46.03 that weapons are prohibited "on the premises of any government court or offices utilized by the court,". She points that if you substitute the legal definition of "premises" into that sentence, you get

- weapons are prohibited "[in] the building or a portion of a building of any government court or offices utilized by the court."

That can be logically read as

- weapons are prohibited in the building of any government court,
or
- weapons are prohibited in any portion of a building of any government court.

To the extent that the "or" in the definition of premises provides a choice, the choice is up to the court/government.

The fines-for-signs law places explicitly restricts the power of the government to forbid licensed carry, except for the statutory exceptions in 46.03 and 46.035. But once those exceptions come in to play, the restriction is now on the carry of weapons, and fines-for-signs does not apply.

However (and I'm not sure how she really came up with this, maybe it was in the AG's arguments) that 46.035 restriction on parts of the building not used by the court applies ONLY when court is in session. That's a significant limit on the power of the courts and government to ban weapons in an entire building.